W4AL – «Walk for all for life» ERASMUS+ SPORT PROGRAMME
(Project Number 603292-EPP-1-2018-1-IT-SPO-SCP)
The W4AL – Walking FOR All Life partnership (IT, DE, GR, ES, DK), according with the HEPA Guidelines and the Council Recommendation on health – enhancing physical activity, aims at promoting healthier Individual lifestyles in adolescents and youth (chiefly those aged 14-25 years old) with specific attention to VET trainees. INDIVIDUALITY here mainly means RESPONSIBILITY of the individual to adopt behaviours and habits that are more respectful of themselves today but also in the future; In fact educational/training activities proposed by school and VET providers must not exhaust the proposal for a regular physical activity.
For this reason, the focus of the project will be WALKING: an activity accessible to and suitable for everyone regardless of the “physical condition”, not intended here only as “performance” rather as the ability of interaction between disabled and non-disabled walkers on equal basis, inclusion… that also here means “cross cutting”: openness to other segments of the population, with zero or very low economic impact, which can be done in different environmental contexts (from city to mountain), etc.
An activity that contains a multiplicity of “other values”: i.e., commitment, progressively more challenging training to reach a goal; preparation (including the right diet, study of the path, etc.) the possibility of discovering what is around us and often not “seeing” which can make us visible to citizenship and be open to it, etc.
To the Group of youngsters will be proposed different type of walking routes with different level of difficulties and skills to learn: technical sport skills and cultural environment skills. For Supporting the activities will provide an Application, available for smartphones and tablet, created ad hoc.
About the implementation of the program have already been completed:
a) the analysis of the framework of good pratices by the member countries of the program partners and the relevant guide has been issued,
b) special routes have been created in urban, semi-urban, semi-mountainous and mountainous environments, which are proposed for testing in the training teams of the program. For each route there are a number of information available in the application, such as: the name of the route, the place – the area, the type of route (urban, mountain, etc.), the length of the route, the time required to travel, the difficulty level, altitude difference, the calories that anyone will consume and the learning objectives of the route.
c) the training teams have been created – test teams of the application for mobile (app) and the routes that have already been created, which (teams) suggest new routes to be integrated in the future in the application.
d) the training of instructors and coaches has been completed both through live seminars (in site) and through asynchronous telecommunication (webinar) with educational material which was produced exclusively for the specific program, and finally
e) The W4AL mobile application (APP) has been created, which is in a testing phase and is constantly being improved based on the observations – suggestions of the training test teams and their coaches.
And to keep yourself updated about the project or to find more information about it, just follow the official homepage of the W4AL project under https://bit.ly/walk4al. There you will thus find more information about the importance of walking, about the state of the youngsters’ fitness condition, about best practices coming from the field of walking, and some recommendations about how to foster the activity of walking within the group of sedentary youngsters. There you will also find more information about the W4AL mobile app.
As a conclusion from the implementation of the project so far, see 3 recommendations on how to foster the state of health of youngsters through walking:
- Try to integrate the activity of walking into as many other activities as possible in youngsters’ everyday life to make it a part of their daily life. The more often, the better for your health and well-being;
- Try to walk 10,000 steps per day as often as possible;
- Try to walk in different environments (city, forest, mountainous areas, other) as often as possible.
| Pn | Organisation | City | Country | Role |
| 1 | CSI Centro Sportivo Italiano | Roma | IT | Applicant |
| 2 | SCF Scuola Centrale di Formazione | Bologna | IT | Partner |
| 3 | Northern Greece Physical Education Teachers Association (EGVE) | Thessaloniki | GR | Partner |
| 4 | Gemeralitat de Catalunya- Department of Education | Barcelona | DE | Partner |
| 5 | Gemeralitat de Catalunya- ConsellCatala de l’ Esport | Barcelona | ES | Partner |
| 6 | Inter College | Aalborg | ES | Partner |
| 7 | CJD | Frechen | DK | Partner |
